The Boys Next Door (7 page)

It had never occurred to me to be jealous of Rachel before. Suddenly I was burning with jealousy, sweating in the humid night. It must be that I saw Rachel as an understudy for Holly and Beige and all the girls at my school who knew what to wear and how to act or, if they didn’t, hid it well. I could totally see a third-grade girl feeling inferior to Rachel and wanting to be Rachel when she grew up. That third-grade girl was thinking someday maybe
she
could have a boyfriend like Adam, who loved her like Adam—

“Argh!” I bellowed as I pitched face-first onto the pine needles. I must have gotten my heel caught in a snake hole.

“Are you okay?” Tammy asked, holding out a hand to help me up. “Nice trick. You should put that in your wakeboarding routine.”

“What? And steal Adam’s thunder?” I brushed myself off. Did I need to go home and change? I was new to this idea of a “wardrobe,” and my supply of Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Tops was limited. Fortunately, my denim miniskirt was made to look dirty. It was very me. And the wild pattern in my top probably concealed any decayed-leaf stains. Satisfied, I walked on with Tammy. I didn’t look back to see whether Adam had watched me fall. I hadn’t forgotten that stare of his.

“Want to play tennis tomorrow night, after it’s cooled off a little?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said before I thought. Tammy and I played tennis all the time in school. Why not out of school, too? After I’d answered, I realized that of course Sean would ask me out for tomorrow night and I wouldn’t get to go with him! Right. I wasn’t lucky enough to have problems like that. Silly me. “You shouldn’t have to drive all the way down here to pick me up and then drive me all the way back.”

“I don’t mind.”

Stepping onto the Vaders’ porch, I said, “McGillicuddy can come get me when we’re through.” My brother never had anything to do on Saturday night. It ran in the family.

“McGillicuddy?” she asked.

We walked back into the party. Fluttering my finely separated lashes, I could hardly believe my luck. Usually at parties I wandered in alone and hoped someone took pity and talked to me. Then, by degrees, I faded into the shadows. Tonight I was entering the party
with
someone.

Of course, the instant we hit the wall of crowd and sound, she pointed across the dark room and shouted above the music, “I’d completely forgotten McGillicuddy was coming back from college! I’m going to say hi.” The two people I felt most comfortable hanging with, hanging with each other instead!

Except for the kids from Birmingham and Montgomery who were vacationing on the lake with their parents and had wandered into the party, I knew all these people from school. I’d been in school with most of them since kindergarten. For some reason, this didn’t help, and possibly made things worse. I watched Tammy weave between knots of people to hug McGillicuddy. I thought about going after her. But then I might look like I didn’t want her to leave me by myself because I wasn’t good at talking to people at parties. Imagine!

Suddenly things looked way, way up. I saw Sean in the darkness, next to the stairs, with his back to me. He stood a few inches taller than his friends who’d just graduated too, who surrounded him. Sean was always surrounded.

As I crossed the room to him, folks kept stepping in my way, wanting to say hey and have conversations with me, of all things. The one time I
wasn’t
interested in being well-liked. Drat! I made nicey-nicey, go away, and resumed my uphill trek across the room, only to have someone else stop me.

By the time I finally reached him, my heart pounded. But it was now or never. I made myself grin at his friends as I slid my hand across his T-shirt, feeling his hard stomach underneath the cotton. I almost flinched at how good and how intimate it felt, but through the marvel of my own willpower, I did not flinch. I laid my head playfully against his chest, as I’d seen girls do when they claimed to be just friends with a guy but everyone whispered something more was going on.

I half-expected him to shout, “Get off me!” and shove me away. Not because Sean would ever do this to a girl—he had more charming ways of extricating himself from cretins—but because my life generally had been a long series of mortifications, and Sean shouting in alarm at my embrace would fit right in. The other half of me expected him to chuckle gently, but not make a move of his own quite yet. It might take him a while to get used to the new me.

He didn’t chuckle. He didn’t shove me away. He did
exactly
what he was supposed to. He slipped his arm around my waist and drew me closer against his warm body. I felt him nodding at something one of the other guys said about baseball, but he didn’t say a word to me or anyone. As if a greeting like this from me were the most natural thing in the world. He smelled even better than usual, too, just a hint of cologne. A woodsy scent with undertones of musk and gunpowder.

I snuggled against him, nose close to his warm, scented chest, and enjoyed a few more seconds of this tingling paradise. What heaven if my whole summer could be like this—

His low voice vibrating through my body, he asked his friends, “Have you been watching the Braves? Awesome pitcher or what?”

Oh God, I was hugging
Adam
!

I jerked away from him. Almost instantly I realized I shouldn’t jerk away from him, because the situation would be slightly less mortifying if I pretended I’d known it was Adam all along.

The damage was done. Worse, I didn’t have a chance to burst out the front door and run—not walk,
run
—all the way home, dash upstairs to the computer in my room, and book a one-way ticket to Antarctica, to join the commune there for teenagers too socially challenged for the chess club. Before I could take another step away, he caught my elbow.

“Later,” he called over his shoulder to the guys. He pulled me into a corner and bent down to whisper in my ear, “You’re blushing.”

I opened my lips. I didn’t seem to be taking in enough oxygen through my nose. “I’m sunburned,” I breathed.

“You thought I was Sean.” The little dolphin was smiling, enjoying my discomfort too much for my taste.

“No, I didn’t.” I made an effort to slow down my breathing through nose
or
mouth. My bosom was heaving, I tell you. I had a heaving bosom!

And Adam noticed. He focused on the V of the Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Top Meant for Another, and slowly, slowly dragged his light blue eyes up to meet my eyes. “I should have said something. I didn’t realize what was happening at first. And then, when I did, I was
really
enjoying myself.”

“Shut up. I didn’t think you were Sean.”

“You thought I was Sean, because I’m as big as him.” He winked at me.

There was no mistaking him for Sean now that I was staring up at him. I tried to figure out what had fooled me into assuming it was him without checking his face and the length of his hair. It could have been his height compared with the boys two years older than him. But something else was different about Adam. He was more confident. More relaxed. More tingle-worthy, like Sean had always been. Those friendly prickles spread across my chest again as Adam’s fingers moved a little, reminding me he still held my elbow.

I pulled reluctantly out of his grip. “It’s not funny, Adam. What if somebody tells Rachel?”

“She won’t mind. She knows we’re friends.”

From my end, the hug hadn’t felt like we were friends. It had felt like we were teetering on the very edge of friendship, about to tumble down a waterfall into depths unknown. With rocks hidden underneath the water. Hard ones.

Or
I
was about to take a tumble, by myself.
He
still stood in his living room like always, at the edge of his crowded party, laughing down at me, thinking,
The Slinky Cleavage-Revealing Top has cut off the blood supply to Lori McGillicuddy’s brain
.

I reached up to his neck. Surprise finally flashed in his eyes—ha!—but he let me pull the skull-and-crossbones pendant on the leather string out from under his shirt.

“You make sure this shows at all times,” I said. “It’s your cowbell. It tells me when you’re coming.” I patted his chest, which I should not have done if we really were just friends. As we’ve established, my brain was walking a few steps behind my body and couldn’t quite catch up. Face still burning, I took a few steps into the crowd. Where would Sean most likely be? Flirting with Holly and Beige simultaneously, pitting the best friends against each other to see what would happen. But no, they were dancing together at the edge of the crowd in the living room, without Sean.

I stopped suddenly.

Walked back to Adam, who was still watching me.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You’re right,” I breathed, my words sinking into the pit of my stomach. “Rachel won’t mind us hugging.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s in the side yard, making out with Sean.”

By the time I’d kicked off my (dirty) heels and dashed after Adam outside, he’d already gotten himself pinned flat on his back under Sean on the pine needles. I winced as Sean shifted to get better leverage and pressed his forearm harder across Adam’s neck.

“Sean!” I hollered, running all the way around them, trying to find a way in. Sometimes I couldn’t pull Sean off Adam, or I even got hit myself. There was a time when I would have tried anyway, disregarding my personal safety. This was back when we were all very small and made of rubber. Nowadays, hollering was more effective, unless they were really into it, in which case nothing would work.

They were really into it. Adam managed to kick Sean off him and get in a blow to Sean’s chin. Usually they didn’t hit each other in the face because Mrs. Vader would see the bruises and they’d get in trouble. Adam must be angry enough tonight not to care.

Sean came right back with a punch to Adam’s gut. While Adam was absorbing that one, Sean pinned Adam’s arm high behind him, tripped him, forced him to the ground, and put one knee on his back. Tonight Sean was more aggressive than usual, intent on causing more pain.

Or—Something wasn’t right. Had they switched shirts? Surely not. Sean didn’t let Adam borrow his clothes. Slowly it dawned on me that Sean was Adam and Adam was Sean. For the first time ever, Adam was kicking Sean’s ass.

“Holy shit,” I said helpfully. “Adam, let him go.”

Adam looked up at me, blue eyes shadowed in the dark between the trees, skull and crossbones swinging at his neck.

This gave Sean the opportunity to buck Adam off. He snatched Adam down to the ground and punched him.

“Sean,” I said, stepping close over them again. They weren’t listening to me. I looked over at Rachel, who had her hands over her mouth and her toes turned in. She looked exactly like a James Bond girl from the pre-Halle Berry era, one of those ditzes who stood safely in the corner and
never
had a dagger when she needed one, like Honey Ryder, or Plenty O’Toole. “Rachel, a little help?” I called.

She stared at me with big doe eyes like she had
no idea
what I was talking about. She’d been with Adam for a month and she’d never seen one of his fights with Sean?

“Call Adam off!” I yelled at her. “Or Sean. Whichever one you can get!” Both.

“Sean, stop,” she said in a whiny little voice that couldn’t have reprimanded a Chihuahua.

“Forget it.” I knelt down on the pine needles and shouted directly at Sean and Adam, on their level. “I’ll go get your dad. Your dad will come down into your party and cuss at you and spit on the ground in front of your friends.”

They didn’t even slow down. Whoever was on top had the other in a choke hold so real, the victim was turning red.

“I’ll go get your mom!”

Adam gave Sean a final shake and stood up quickly, before Sean could catch his leg and pull him down. “What is the
matter
with you?” Adam screamed.

Yeah. What was the
matter
with Sean? He was making out with Rachel, that’s what. This was terrible! It blew my theory out of the water that Sean had never asked me out because I was too young for him. Rachel was a year younger than
me
!

Normally I would have given up, slunk home, and broken out the Cheetos. I would have immersed myself in
I, Robot
for comfort (again) and put it down after every paragraph to wallow in my own outrage and loss. He’d flirted with
me
just that afternoon! He’d wiped bryozoa on
me
!

Luckily, this was no normal night. Tonight I was on a mission. So I reasoned that all wasn’t lost. Maybe Sean had flirted with me because he was overcome by my charms and wit (ho ho), but he didn’t see me as the girlfriend type. After all, I’d never been anyone’s girlfriend. Rachel didn’t have this problem. Sean had watched Rachel go out with Adam for a month.

Sean stood up more slowly than Adam had, taking deep, ragged breaths, clearly hurting. I waited for Adam to decide Sean had had enough of his wrath for now, and turn to Rachel. I looked forward to hearing what Adam would call her, to save me the trouble. But he never even glanced in her direction. He said again, still to Sean, “What the hell is the matter with you?” His voice broke.